This announcement and the accompanying instruction delighted the spy beyond measure. If his recent experiences had not schooled him in the very wise habit of self-restraint, his first joyful impulse might have got him into trouble.
"Just wait a minute and I'll fix you up with an order for some money and some clothes," said "the baron" after a few moments of silence.
He picked up a pen and busied himself filling out a form and writing a note on a letterhead of the department. These he folded and placed hi separate envelopes. The envelopes he addressed and handed to the spy.
"There, that's all today, I think," he said. "Whatever you need hereafter will be taken care of by Mr. Herrmann. Inquire outside and you'll be directed where to go to have this order cashed."
Irving thanked him and left the office. Ten minutes later he was outside the building with a comfortable roll of bank-bills in his pocket. As he started up the street with directions in his mind for reaching the quartermaster's office, he saw Blau on the opposite sidewalk and was reminded of the instruction given that intelligence operative to shadow the young spy's shadower.
CHAPTER XXX
BEFORE BREAKFAST
Irving dismissed from his mind for the time being the mystery concerning the middle-aged man in civilian clothes who had followed him through the streets on two occasions. His fears regarding the incident were dispelled, for he felt that Blau, the intelligence operative on the opposite side of the street, would take care of that matter very efficiently. Everything was coming his way now, and he in his mission than he had felt at any other time walked alone; with greater confidence of success since landing with his parachute.
It was a ten minute walk to the quartermaster's headquarters. At the entrance of the building, his curiosity concerning the game of "shadow chase shadow" which he presumed to be going on behind him was aroused by a sudden reverting of his mind to the subject, and he turned and looked down the street by which he had come. There was Blau, half a square away, but the "middle-aged man in civilian clothes" was not in sight.
"I wonder if he got onto the fact that somebody was directed to watch him," Irving mused. "But that ought not to have stopped him. He had nothing to fear from an agent of another department if he was engaged in legitimate government business."